Billionaire Peter Thiel submits bid to buy Gawker.com, a site he helped bankrupt

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUMThe New York Times

Fri., Jan. 12, 2018

Peter Thiel, the technology billionaire, submitted a bid this week to purchase Gawker.com, the remaining unsold property from the Gawker Media gossip empire that was nearly destroyed in 2016 by a lawsuit largely bankrolled by Thiel.

If approved, the acquisition could be the last step in a yearslong effort by Thiel to finish an independent journalism outfit that angered him in 2007 when it reported, without his permission, that he is gay, a fact widely known at the time in Silicon Valley.

Gawker.com has received other offers, and it is not clear if Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, will prevail. A winning bid is expected to be announced in the coming weeks, if representatives of Gawker.com do not take the site off the market.

“There are going to be multiple factors to consider, which will not be solely economic,” said Will Holden, administrator of Gawker’s bankruptcy plan.

Thiel, who has an estimated net worth of $ 2.5 billion (U.S.), according to Forbes, has the means to beat almost any rival bidder. But Holden said the “ethos” of Gawker — which prided itself on a wry, pirate-ship approach to reporting — would also be considered in determining new ownership of the Gawker name.

Gawker Media went bankrupt in 2016 after a $ 140-million legal judgment against it in an invasion-of-privacy case brought by former wrestler Hulk Hogan. Gawker.com had published a black-and-white sex tape of Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea; a Florida jury awarded damages to the wrestler after a two-week trial.

It also emerged that Thiel had spent about $ 10 million in secretly backing the lawsuit, a move that many Gawker employees interpreted as an attempt at revenge. Thiel told the New York Times: “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence. I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”

Univision bought Gawker Media at auction in August 2016 for $ 135 million. The company changed the name of its new asset to Gizmodo Media Group, after the group’s Gizmodo tech blog, and jettisoned the Gawker.com flagship site, which remains online, albeit in a static form, a digital orphan. Raju Narisetti, formerly an executive at News Corp., took the place of the Gawker Media founder, Nick Denton, as the chief executive officer.

Thiel’s interest in buying Gawker.com has led to speculation that he might delete the site’s archives, effectively erasing its journalism from the web. A spokesperson for the billionaire did not respond to multiple inquiries for comment.

Holden declined to comment on the dollar amount of Thiel’s offer. Kevin Lee, the head of a marketing firm, Didit, also submitted a bid for Gawker.com, according to Reuters, which first reported Thiel’s offer.